SimplyBlog
Summary: The Shangri-la diet is basically to drink a few tablespoons of extra-light olive oil every day, with the idea that this will suppress your appetite. With a lower appetite, you’ll eat less and lose weight. Sounds great. So far, I’ve tried it for 3 weeks with no measurable weight loss, while the book suggests an expected 2-3 pounds of weight loss per week. It’s an interesting theory of appetite, and well worth further study, but I suggest some alternate reasons some people may feel the diet is working for them even if the theory proves wrong. (Bonus weight loss thoughts and photos provided.)
A friend asked me to try the Shangri-la diet with her. It sounded like a fad diet, but it also seemed harmless, so it was worth a try. The theory behind the diet also had a certain resonance, so it was definitely an interesting diet to try. I’ve been on the diet 3 weeks now.
What is the Shangri-la Diet? Each day, drink 2-5 tablespoons of extra-light olive oil (or the calorie equivalent in unflavored sugar water), without eating anything else with flavor within one hour before or one hour after (water is allowed). For bonus effects, avoid strongly-flavored foods and eat a variety of new and unexpected flavors. Drinking the olive oil will reduce your appetite, and you’ll lose weight by eating less. You don’t need to make any other deliberate changes in diet or exercise.
What’s the theory behind it? The idea behind the diet is that strongly-flavored foods with calories increase a person’s appetite while non-flavored foods with calories, such as extra-light olive oil (ELOO) and plain sugar-water (sweetness doesn’t count as a flavor for some reason) will decrease the appetite. By drinking ELOO every day, your appetite is supposed to go down significantly over time, although you will have to keep drinking ELOO the rest of your life in order to avoid regaining weight. This is a small amount of ELOO, so that seems harmless enough.
Did it work? I’ve been on this diet for 3 weeks now. That is, every night, I drink 2 tablespoons of ELOO. I’ve been weighing myself almost every day, and there is no apparent weight loss. Of course, my weight fluctuates up and down every day in the range of about 5 pounds. Last night, for example, I was in fact 2 pounds heavier than when I began the diet, but tomorrow I could easily be 2 pounds lighter. This is normal variation, so the diet isn’t having an effect yet that is bigger than my normal variation.
The oil is supposed to have the bonus effect of being good for your hair and skin (the book doesn’t say in what way). I haven’t noticed any silky softness or golden glow, so nothing obvious is happening.
The book suggests that most people will see 2-3 pounds of loss per week, though it doesn’t happen right away for everyone (a nice cop-out to explain away a failure). The book suggests that, for someone like me, if I’m not losing weight I should increase my use of ELOO until I see an effect. I’m not eager to increase it right away, since ELOO means more calories, and if a little bit had no effect, I’m reluctant to risk gaining weight by taking more. In any case, I may try this increase, in which case I’ll blog again if it works at all. Until I try increasing the amount of ELOO, it must be said that I didn’t give the diet an entirely fair try.
One thing I noticed after a few days of taking the ELOO was a reduction of appetite. Was this real or just a placebo effect? In fact, the book mentions many people reporting the loss of appetite, but no attempt is ever made to try to quantify this or make it into an objective measurement. Maybe I was just noticing times I had no appetite, whereas before the diet I wasn’t bothering to think about it. Now that it’s been 3 weeks, I have to say the appetite effect is not clear. I still get the munchies periodically, and I have no pre-diet record to compare it against. One example is that I’ll take my ELOO and then crave eating something for the next hour while I wait till the 1-hour window closes and I’m allowed to eat again. Doesn’t sound like it’s doing a very good job of curbing appetite.
Why do I find the diet interesting? What is appealing about this diet is that it is based on appetite control. All my life I’ve struggled with weight gain and tried several diets. I’ve been successful at losing weight before, only to eventually gain it back. Appetite seems to be a very significant factor.
There are those who treat weight loss as a matter of self-discipline, and I have to strongly disagree. I’ve known people who judged me as immoral and lacking self-discipline because I couldn’t stay light. Seriously! Can you believe there are such judgmental people? But I look at them and I don’t see those people biting their lips trying not to eat while the cravings torture them. No, indeed. But that’s how I feel, and many people feel who try to diet. In other words, it appears that our appetites are significantly stronger. The Shangri-la diet attempts to account for how appetites can be variable, and how we might fix this. This makes tremendous sense. However, I’m not sure the diet hits on exactly how appetite is controlled.
What might be some explanations for the diet’s “apparent” success?
One of the clear signs of hucksterism is excessive use of anecdotal evidence and testimonials. This book is full of testimonials. The author carefully throws in some failures to give the impression of being fair, but let’s be fair. First, he has a sampling bias: he’s more likely to hear success stories posted on a site dedicated to the diet. People who fail with the diet will likely quickly lose interest and move on. Second, why would I believe that he’s reporting a fair selection of failures? Third, anecdotal evidence and self-reports are highly suspect and no serious scientist would use this as his core evidence. He needs a carefully-executed double-blind experiment with long-term follow-up. Otherwise, there’s no way to distinguish his fad diet from all the other poorly-performing fad diets. Since the author is trained to care about getting proper scientific evidence (he’s a psychology professor, after all) and he deliberately and emphatically uses evidence he knows to be suspect, I have to strongly question his motives.
USELESS testimonials: In many of the success testimonials, people report starting the diet “yesterday” and immediately having a loss of appetite, or having a 3 pound weight loss after a week. Losing your appetite on one day is hardly evidence of anything, so that’s a useless testimonial. And, as I pointed out, a 3 pound weight loss is well within normal body weight variation from day to day, so that also is a useless testimonial. Because of the easy possibility for biased observation of appetite, reports of appetite change are also useless.
Some people may have actual appetite changes, and this may well be a placebo effect. The diet author argues that this is not so because drinking things other than ELOO seem to have different effects, consistent with his theories. Fair enough.
Here’s one clear confound: because I have to avoid eating one hour before and one hour after the ELOO, I’m forced to have a solid 2 hour window every day with no snacking. That forced period of no snacking is likely to be a significant change for many people with weight issues. That 2 hour period alone can account for reduced eating, and thus weight loss. If people are distributing their consumption of ELOO across the day (one tablespoon in the morning, one in the evening, for instance), an option the book mentions, then they are forcing even more time without snacking. This could easily account for some people’s weight loss.
The obesity epidemic
The Shangri-la diet book suggests that our current obesity epidemic is due to mass-produced, packaged, highly-consistent, high-calorie, high-flavor foods. Sensible enough.
Some other recent research on the obesity epidemic also seems worth considering, and provides a radically different explanation. Over the last couple years, I’ve been reading some interesting research suggesting that the obesity epidemic did not correlate well with the growth of fast food use, either temporally or geographically (the Shangri-la book has one graph in the appendix that seems to counter this claim and support the correlation). One set of additional contributing factors is the possibility of a virus that causes obesity, Adenovirus-36 (see any of these articles: article 1, article 2, article 3) and/or the possibility of a stomach bacteria that causes weight gain by simply being really efficient at converting food to calories (e.g., see this article). I don’t want to give these theories too much credence, because the research is still very tentative, but they make sense to me as contributing factors.
Attitudes toward weight
I once mentioned to a “friend” that I wish someday I could take a pill that would simply cure me of my weight gain. I was serious. I really believe that I am not to blame, and we need to figure out the cause and help people overcome weight problems. My “friend” reacted to my comment to the effect that I was lazy, worthless, and gluttonous, and that I wanted a cheap fix for something that was entirely my fault. These negative and arrogant attitudes are sadly prevalent and quite destructive to everyone involved.
I honestly believe one of the biggest contributors to my personal difficulties with weight loss is the social environment. People encourage eating and do not support avoidance of eating. Even trying to help me by criticizing my eating can be counterproductive because it only encourages me to eat on the sly. What I need my friends to do to support me is to: 1. never offer food unless it is unambiguously healthy, such as carrots; 2. never deny me food if I request it (this ability to regulate my own eating is very important — if I’m denied food, my appetite will skyrocket), 3. never make snack foods convenient, 4. if you like, you can praise me for healthy eating and exercise, but never criticize (it just makes me want to avoid you), and 5. if you want to go out, don’t go out for food, or if you want to eat, choose a restaurant with a wide assortment of light and healthy options (smaller servings, salad bars, etc.)
Bonus: my previous big experience with dieting
“Thin Tom”, 2002, after a 65-70 pound weight loss. The diet came from my doctor and was based on a common-sense approach: eat right, eat more fruits and vegetables, balanced meals, remove ALL snacks, desserts, and sweets, and exercise about 2 hours daily and much longer on weekends.
Today’s Tom, 2007, after regaining most of the weight (most recent Shangri-la diet notwithstanding). I’m glad I had my prior diet because I now exercise more regularly than before the old diet, and I feel better for it. Nevertheless, the rigors of daily 2-hour exercise and absolute avoidance of snacks proved impossible to maintain.
The Shangri-La Diet: Impressions of another fad diet
Sunday, October 7, 2007
